Always and Forever
by GirlWithTheRedSoxCap
Summary: One Shot. Bran tells Jon and his sisters the truth about Jon's parentage. When Jon thinks that everything he has ever known is a lie, Arya is there to remind him of the one thing that will always be true. Them. Post Season 7. Jon and Arya's relationship can be read as either platonic or romantic.


_A/N: Because I love Jon and Arya's relationship and their reunion is the thing I am most excited to see in seasons 8. Their relationship is a lot more apparent in the books than it is in the show. In my opinion, it's because they think about each all the time and that's hard to translate onto TV. You can read their relationship in this as platonic or potentially romantic in this, it's up to you. Personally, I think Jon and Arya are going to end up together in the books, but I don't think it's going to happen in the show. Also, not beta'd._

 **Always and Forever**

Bran sits beneath the Heart Tree, the snow falling around him. For the first time in a long time, feels something. He feels a need to comfort Jon to say something, anything, to make this okay. But he can't.

 _I had to. Jon had to know. I didn't have a choice._

Bran help can't but feel as though it's his fault, even though he knows it's not.

The worry that clouds Sansa's pristine blue eyes. The anger radiating off of Arya. The pain and devastation stitched across Jon's face.

Sansa sits there, her back perfectly straight, her beautiful features twisted in shock, her mind working overtime to process this, what it means. How it will affect the North, their family. Strategizing. Working through all the ways this could help them. Or if it will destroy them. As if there weren't enough factors to deal with.

Arya is angry.

She has always been angry. Angry at the world for dictating her fate, for not giving her a choice, for telling her that who she is was wrong. Angry at her enemies for all they had done to her family, the North, and those who couldn't fight for themselves. Angry at the world, for all it had taken from her. Angry at herself for not being able to save those she loves, for knowing that no matter how many names she crosses off her list, it will never be enough, because she can't bring them back.

But now, she was angry for Jon.

He doesn't deserve this. Jon is the best person Arya knows. She loves more him than anyone, she always has and she always will. All her childhood she watched him suffer the fate of being a bastard. Suffer for something that he couldn't control. Suffer for a lie. So she gets angry, because that all she knows.

Jon can't breathe He can't even think. It's too much. So he runs. He doesn't know where he is going but he doesn't really care.

Jon finds himself sitting on top of the tower that had once been a guard post but had been abandoned for decades. He used to come when he wanted to think. It's quiet and he can see the whole of Winterfell from here.

It's a lie. Everything he thought he knew nothing more than a lie. Ned Stark is not his father. _He's my uncle_ Jon thinks bitterly _like Benjen_. Jon wonders if Benjen had known. If the man he had grown up idolizing had lied to him too.

Arya, Robb, Sansa, Bran, and Rickon had never been his siblings.

 _Cousins_.

All his life Jon endured it, the curse of being a bastard. The contempt from Lady Stark, the mocking from Theon, the whispers behind his back. He always pretended that it never bothered him but it did.

Lord Snow, that's what Allister Thorne had dubbed him. Always a Snow never a Stark. All his life he wanted to be a Stark, to be trueborn. But the world is cruelly ironic. He _is_ trueborn, but a Targaryen instead.

 _Ned Stark's bastard._

That what's Jon had always been first and foremost. It had been his label, his claim to an identity and he had worn it like armor.

He had never wanted to be King in the North, and yet all along he has been the rightful heir to Iron Throne, and not a bastard at all.

The whole thing is bitterly ironic. A cruel joke the world sees fit to torment him with.

Everything Jon was raised to believe is a lie. And that hurts him more than anything.

"I thought I might find you up here."

The grey-eyed girl takes a seat next to him, her feet dangling over the edge.

Arya knows him better than anyone, even now, after all these years and all they'd been through, she still does.

 _Two halves of one whole._

The only ones with Stark look.

 _What do you know of my heart, priestess? What do you know of my sister?_

Jon could pretend for everyone, but not her, not his little wolf.

"You know nothing, Jon Snow." He laughs bitterly, the last words of the girl he had loved ringing in his ears.

Arya looks over at him. "Ygritte." For once, her voice is soft when it's always been steel.

 _She's afraid of cutting me._

Jon nods. "She was always right, in the end." There's a bitter tinge to his words.

He doesn't like to talk about the girl he had loved and lost, it hurts too much, even now. But he told Arya. They told each other everything, all they had done. All their sins, all the failures, and losses, no matter how terrible, how painful.

"I was scared, y'know. More than when I thought I would bleed out in the Braavosi alley. More than when they would pick who torture at Harrenhall. More than that day in front of the Sept. I was terrified that when I told you all I had done, the people I killed, the sins I committed, that you would hate me. I could lose everything, but not you. I don't think I would have survived that. But you loved me all the same. You told me we all have blood on our hands. But then I told you that I didn't have blood on my hands, that it covered me, a stained me and I could never wash it away. I wasn't your little wolf anymore. That that girl had died when they took Ned Stark's head. Do you remember what you told me then?"

Jon swallows. "That it didn't matter. That it has always been you and me and it will always be you and me. That nothing can ever change that."

They had always understood each other in a way no one else could. Two misfits who had never truly belonged. The brooding bastard and the little lady who was anything but.

She nods. "You were right. You still are."

Arya takes his face in her hands. They're small and cold and littered with scars, just like her. "This doesn't change anything. Not for me. Brother or cousin, you're still my blood. Snow, Stark, Targaryen. Jon or Aegon. None of that matters. I don't give a damn what your name is, or who fathered you. Ned Stark will always be your father, more than some dead prince ever will be. He raised you to be the man I see before me, and I love that man, more than anything else in this whole world. I always have. You are still the boy who gave me Needle. Who loved and accepted me for who I was and never tried to change me. Even our father could never do that. You are my pack, always and forever."

He looks into her stormy eyes, that ones that haunted his dreams, the ones that reminded him of home.

"Always and forever." He whispers back.


End file.
